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  “I guess so,” she said doubtfully. “Is that all?”

  “I’m sorry.” I gave a little laugh. “But this little list I have in front of me says I have to get an answer to that last question or I don’t get credit for this call. Did either you or Mr. Friedman resume your viewing when the interruption was completed?”

  “No.” And then she added in a funny voice, “It didn’t seem as interesting as real life anymore.”

  “Not as interesting as real life,” I repeated, as if I were writing down a criticism. “Would you care to expand on that . . .”

  “Wait,” she commanded.

  I had the feeling she had put her hand over the receiver, and I heard a murmur of voices, as from a television. I nearly hung up then.

  “What did you say the name of your company is?” She returned so suddenly my heart jumped.

  “We’re a survey company for . . .”

  “No, what’s the name, please?”

  “The name?”

  “Yes.”

  I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I had said it was, and I was on the verge of hanging up without another word when a male voice came on an extension.

  “You sound like Jennifer Cain.” It was Friedman, sounding furious and something else . . . nervous? Scared? “What kind of trick is this?”

  “I’ll explain,” I said.

  “Yes, you will,” he said, and rapped out his address.

  The girlfriend, still on her extension, said in a wounded voice, “Now that I think about it, the movie wasn’t even on CBS.”

  “I’ll be—”

  One of them hung up.

  “—right—”

  The other one hung up.

  “—there, folks.”

  I hung up, walked over to Lewis’s car, and leaned down to the driver’s seat.

  “She was there,” I told him. “And I’m going there now.”

  He said he’d follow me. It was then I noticed the copy of New York magazine that lay open on his lap.

  “I don’t believe you!” I exclaimed. “Lewis, you have to take that magazine right back into that store this very minute!”

  “Take it back?” He screwed up his face at me. “Are you kidding? I just paid two bucks for it, I’m not taking it back! What do you think this place is, a library? Honest to God, Cain, sometimes I wonder about you.” He reached down between the seats and brought up a white Styrofoam cup with a lid. “Here, I think you need this.”

  It was hot coffee.

  “You bought this?”

  He nodded.

  “For me?”

  He nodded.

  “Thanks.” I returned to my car, holding my head and the coffee cup high, trying to look dignified.

  24

  “This is my friend, Sonya Klein,” Friedman said when I stepped into his house. His tone was as flat and inhospitable as a dry wind across a prairie. He was wearing clean, pressed jeans and an immaculate long-sleeved black knit shirt, so that he reminded me again of a slim tree with bare branches, as he had that day when I had first met him, beside John Rudolph’s grave. But this time, he held himself so stiffly that I thought maybe he had run a steam iron over himself, as well as over the pants and the shirt.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Instead of reaching for my hand to shake, she reached for one of his hands to hold and only nodded at me. Sonya was a short, pretty blonde, about ten pounds overweight, wearing a pink terry-cloth jumpsuit and pink bunny slippers. Like him, she looked about 35. Her smile kept flickering on and off like a light bulb with a bad connection. All in all, the atmosphere was thick with nerves and incongruity and caution.

  I waited for them to make the next move. That seemed to confuse them, for they glanced back and forth as if each one hoped the other would take the lead. “Your turn,” his dark eyes seemed to say to her. “But it’s your house,” her big blue eyes seemed to plead with him.

  “Could I have some coffee?” I asked.

  “Coffee?” He stared at me, then at her. Again, they communicated with their eyes: “Do we have any coffee?” “Should we give her coffee?” “Are you going to do it?” “No, you do it.” I could almost hear the words; it was the sort of extradimensional communication that goes on between twins or lovers.

  “Instant’s fine,” I said, looking at him.

  Friedman jerked out of his paralysis and walked stiffly toward the kitchen. I turned to her then, and suggested: “Do you think we could sit down?”

  “Parlor,” she said, and led me there.

  The house was a small two-story Victorian that had probably once been advertised as “a handyman’s dream.” Somebody had laid loving hands on it, however, and worked it into a modest showplace of hardwood floors, refinished antiques, and stained-glass windows.

  “You’ve done beautiful work here,” I said. When she didn’t deny the compliment, I felt sure they had renovated the house together. I tried buttering her up. “I’ve always admired people with these sorts of talents.”

  “I’m an interior decorator,” she said, and then blushed. She gave me a frightened look, as if she’d made some incriminating admission, and pressed her lips together. But it wasn’t in her to be rude. She opened her plump lips to suggest that I sit on the love seat. “The cushions are stuffed with real goose down,” she told me in a hesitant, chatty way, “so it’s not as hard as some of this other stuff. Aaron and I got into antiques because we like the way they look, but I guess we didn’t think about actually sitting on them. He says we can thank television for comfortable furniture. I mean, it’s impossible to imagine a Victorian sitting in a reclining rocker, isn’t it?”

  “Especially a vibrating one,” I said, and she bit her lower lip to keep from smiling. I added, quietly, carefully, “But I guess they didn’t watch many Sunday-night movies.” She flushed and pressed her lips together again. This time, she was going to wait for him to come back.

  When he did, it was with a coffeepot and three cups.

  Once he had poured for everybody, he settled close beside her on the settee and lit one of his filtertip, menthol cigarettes. Within seconds, the room smelled like burnt breath mints. I suspected they could communicate by the nudge-and-press method as well as by eye contact, and that put me at a disadvantage. If I’d been a cop I’d have separated them, even sending them to different rooms to question them, to break their vibrational field.

  “What’s going on here?” Friedman blurted, certainly not the first person to do so that evening.

  I looked him in the eyes, then her, in an effort to seem honest and sincere. She was round and sunny; he was a thin, dark shadow. It was like looking at noon and midnight of the same day. I regarded the united intelligence opposite me and opted for the Lewis Riss method of criminal interrogation. “I think I ought to tell you the police know that Sylvia Davis was here the night she died.”

  “Oh,” Sonya said, with a moan escaping from her lips, and she took one of his hands into her pink terry-cloth lap. They very carefully did not look at each other.

  “That’s crazy,” he said.

  “She got drunk at the office party,” I said. “While she was there, Stan Pittman told her their affair would have to stop, because Jack Smith was blackmailing him. That really upset her, because she hadn’t known about the blackmailing, and she was afraid she’d lose her job over it. She left the party to go drinking with the three gravediggers, and got into a fight with Smith, accusing him of betraying her. I gather that she had confided in him about her affair with Stan, and now she was furious to find out that he’d used that information to blackmail her boss and lover.

  “She stormed out of the bar, Jack following. She told him she was coming over here to see you, Aaron, to see if you’d help her keep her job. She stayed about forty-five minutes, according to Sonya. I think it would be a good idea if you could prove those were not the last forty-five minutes of her life.”

  This time they looked at each other. The silent communication lasted
a long time, and I would have given anything to have been privy to it.

  “She was here,” Friedman finally said. He looked as if the words hurt. “She told us about the blackmail, and she pleaded with me to help her.” He frowned, gazed at the carpet. “She was crying so hard, and she was really drunk. It was like seeing a whole different side of somebody I thought I knew.” He glanced up at me. “I really liked her. She was always nice to, everybody, and she worked like a dog. She was a very responsible person, at least when it came to her business life. So sure, I was going to help her if I could . . .” His voice trailed off; he looked away again. “God, it was going to be so embarrassing, but I was going to talk to Stan about the situation the next day and tell him that if he was going to fire anybody it ought to be Jack.”

  “You wanted to fire, him, anyway,” I said.

  “Yes, but Stan always said no. And now, of course, I know why.” He paused to look at Sonya, then back at me. “Listen, there’s one thing though . . .”

  “What?”

  “Sylvia wasn’t having an affair with Stan.”

  “But you just said . . .”

  He shook his head in tight left-and-right movements, the sign of a man who is going to be obstinate about something.

  I sighed. “All right, skip that for now. What happened after you said you’d talk to Stan about his being blackmailed for . . . ,” I let my voice grow sarcastic, “. . . not having an affair with her.”

  “She was grateful, and she started to cry again.” Friedman looked at Sonya as if pleading with her to take over the story from there.

  “Sylvia began to tell us how much she missed John Rudolph.” Sonya’s voice was sweet with sympathy. “She hadn’t really loved him, she said, any more than she loved any of the others, but she’d spent a lot of time with him, and she missed him. I think . . .” Sonya looked into Friedman’s eyes, then back at me. “I think . . . she was grieving for a lot of things that night, maybe even her marriage. The poor little thing, she just kept saying, ‘I’m so lonely . . . I just want somebody to hold me.’ We tried to get her to stay here with us, to sleep it off, but she wouldn’t. She was really kind of out of control. Aaron tried to get her keys out of her purse, but I guess she’d left them in the ignition, and we didn’t think of that. So we couldn’t force her to stay, and we let her go.” The sympathetic voice trembled, then stopped.

  “And neither of you left the house again that night?”

  “No,” she said, at the same time he said, “Of course not.”

  “And,” I looked at Friedman, “you were home sick this morning when Muriel Rudolph was killed.”

  “Yes,” he said, at the same time Sonya said, “I stayed home to nurse him.”

  “Where did Sylvia go when she left here?”

  They looked at each other, shook their heads.

  “You don’t know. And you didn’t tell any of this to the police,” I guessed, “because you didn’t want to hurt Stan or his family.”

  As one, they nodded.

  “But if he wasn’t really having an affair with her,” I said insistently, “how could the truth, hurt him?”

  They looked at each other again, passed some sort of unspoken words, then simultaneously took up their coffee to drink. They didn’t meet my eyes over their cups.

  “Please,” I said.

  But they had gone dumb on me.

  “I’ll have to ask Stan,” I told them.

  They looked shocked, as if that possibility hadn’t occurred to them, and then they looked resigned.

  “I suppose so” was all Friedman would say.

  “Please.” Sonya glanced from me to Aaron and back again. “Please, tell him that Aaron tried to protect his family, please tell him that.”

  “All right.” I was growing tired of these decent, careful people who had not volunteered this information to the police and who would not take me further down the road toward the truth. It was exasperation and weariness that made me take a last, mean shot at him.

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  He blinked, looked into his lover’s eyes.

  Again, as one, they shook their heads.

  I gave it up and let them walk me back to the front door. They seemed relaxed, now, as if all were forgiven, as if they were glad to have gotten it off their chests. And who was I to think they should confide in me?

  “Good night,” I said, none too graciously. And then to Friedman, “You sure got over your cold fast.”

  “I took an antihistamine and a decongestant this evening,” he said promptly. “Cleared up the symptoms right away.”

  “Another modern medical miracle.” I turned to go.

  “Jenny?”

  I looked back to see them standing together in the doorway, their arms entwined. She smiled sweetly at me.

  “Multi-Markets,” she said.

  This time, Lewis was waiting for me in the front seat of my car, nearly giving me a heart attack when I came upon him there.

  “Dead end,” I said, when I could breathe again. I told him what little more I knew of the last night of Sylvia’s life. “Of course, we have only their word that Sylvia left here alone that night, or that Friedman really was sick this morning.”

  “Why would he kill Mrs. Rudolph?” Lewis asked.

  “Maybe he didn’t want Sonya to know he’d had an affair with Sylvia?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. We don’t even know if he did have an affair with her. Would you kill two women to keep another woman from finding out you were unfaithful?”

  “Only if I thought she’d kill me first if she found out,” Lewis said, and grinned. “Does this Sonya look like the violent type?”

  I thought about the pink jumpsuit and the fluffy pink bunny slippers and said, “What do I know? Maybe we ought to take this to Ailey now, and see what he thinks,”

  “But we still don’t know who did it.”

  “Perfectionist! We know she went to The Seaman, we know she fought with Jack, we know she came over here to Friedman’s, and that he and his lady friend claim that when she left them she was still alive. I think we’ve found out a lot, and I’ll bet you it’s more than Ailey knows.”

  “All right.” Lewis nodded. “We’ll tell him tomorrow.”

  I touched his hand. “Do you think you’ll be able to sleep tonight?”

  “Sure. I’ve got more than one good night’s sleep locked up in the trunk of my car.” He shrugged wearily, but then made a valiant effort to leer at me. “I’d manage it a lot better if I had a little company.”

  I shook my head, smiled. “Not if she fell asleep on you.”

  “That might have its pleasures, too.” He shrugged again, then opened the door. “Oh well, you’re an upper and the drugs are a downer, and if I tried to take you both at the same time, I’d probably send my system into toxic shock.” Lewis got out of my car, then leaned back in to say, “Thanks all the same, but not tonight, Jenny.”

  “Did I offer?”

  But he had already closed the door, and was walking to his car.

  I watched him go. I desperately wanted to go home to bed myself, but I was momentarily unable to summon the energy to turn the key in the ignition. Instead, I leaned my head against the seat and stared at the roof. The overhead light was still on because Lewis hadn’t gotten the door closed entirely when he left. I reached over and slammed and locked it. The light extinguished, leaving me alone in the dark.

  It was beginning to feel eerie, this business of tracking the path a woman had taken on the night she died. I was following in her footsteps nearly to the hour she took them. When I left Friedman’s, it was going on eleven; when she left there, it was nearly midnight.

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it was like to be Sylvia Davis that night. She was frightened of losing her job, hurt over the betrayal by her friend, and grieving over the death of her lover and the failure of her marriage. She was lonely, so lonely she ached for somebody to hold her, and she was drunk. I tried to imagine the emptin
ess she felt that night, and the guilt? She was a woman who loved the company of men, and she was losing the main ones in her life in rapid order . . . her husband to divorce, one lover to death, another to fear, her friend to greed. She was used to being loved, but who was there now to love her when she needed it most? The grief and the loneliness she would have felt if she were sober would have been doubled, tripled, quadrupled—must, indeed, have been multiplied exponentially—by the alcohol, until that grief inhabited every cell of her body. Like a demon, it would have taken possession of her brain, filling the hemispheres, squeezing out any other thoughts, certainly any rational ones. It would have filled the ventricles of her heart, pouring in like wet cement and hardening, until her very ribs hurt from the hideous pressure of grief in her chest. This was no intelligent, conscientious, “pleasant” Sylvia; this was the after-hours woman, the voluptuous child who was irretrievably possessed and driven by her own desires and emotions. By the time she left Sonya and Aaron, Sylvia Davis would have been a quivering, aching pool of self-pity.

  “I’m so lonely,” I said it aloud, trying to mean it, trying to feel the ache. “I just want somebody to hold me.”

  But not just anybody, not this woman. Aaron and Sonya would have patted and comforted her, if all she needed was a friendly hug. No, it wasn’t the embrace of platonic friends—if indeed, Aaron was such—that she desired. For this particular woman, in those particular circumstances, only a certain kind of somebody would do, and that body would have to be male: sexually, attractively, desirably male. She might have known a thousand men who fit that description and fled to any one of them after she left Friedman’s. Certainly, she didn’t go home; she was too lonely to go home. But I suspected there were only a few of those thousand men who were high enough up on the ladder of desirability, and difficult enough to obtain, to satisfy her ego that night, to reassure her that she, a woman who was losing her men, could still attract whomever she wanted, whenever she wanted. And only a few of them would have been living, conveniently, alone. Well, there was an obvious possibility, and I was supposed to see him in his office tomorrow . . .